China Environmental Law

Back again.  A resumption of the discussion of things environmental will have to wait until Friday.  I’m digging out of a mountain of accumulated emails and other work, and I’m going to be at the AmCham Shanghai Sustainability Conference (see here) tomorrow.

Qiandao Hu was entertaining.  I attended my first “fish barbecue,” where your favorite small fry was impaled, roasted to a cracklin’ crunch, and washed down with nice warm beer. I seemed that out on the dark lake waters by our grill site squadrons of mosquitoes were launched from little bug aircraft carriers to carry out an assault on the invading holiday makers.  Our hosts counterattacked with a bug bomb that was detonated from the center of the kon tiki bar which dispensed our delightfully tepid beverages.  The resulting mushroom cloud of what I’m sure was a harmless pesticide added an additional festive touch to the proceedings. 

Here’s a picture of several of the 1000 islands:

A portion of the descent from this height was accomplished by the means of the “slippery grass” slide ( billed as the longest in China–does the Slippery Grass Association of China verify these claims?).  The grass was in fact astroturf, but I have to say you did achieve sufficient speed at one point during the ride that crashing into and through the barriers at the end of the slide seemed a distinct possibility. 

The trip was redeemed by a walk up a relatively pristine mountain side the next day.  The trail crisscrossed a little stream which cascaded down the mountain forming little clear pools when the terrain levelled out a bit.  The air felt remarkably fresh.  So all’s well that ends well, and it was then off to Xiamen, but I will report on that another day.